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When people told me what a shattering and moving look at Japanese soldiers they thought that politely reverent museum piece “Letters from Iwo Jima” was, I snickered and said, “Haven’t seen ‘Fires on the Plain,’ have you?”
When folks say that stuff like the hippie-dippy “Thin Red Line” or Israel’s yawn-inducing foreign film Oscar entry “Beaufort” really showed them something about the psychic toll of battle, I tell them to check out the real thing: “The Burmese Harp.”
I don’t believe that the director of those two films, Kon Ichikawa, fought in World War II. But he understood the full pyschology of the Japanaese soldier, his humanity and his savagery, like no other filmmaker has come close to.
He had a varied – some say schizophrenic – career that included traditional comedies, satires, period dramas, character studies, obsessive eroticism, suspense thrillers, the technically marvelous “Tokyo Olympiad” and even cartoons. Many of his films were great, but as word spreads of Ichikawa’s death at the age of 92, I’m mainly reminded of the movies that so indelibly showed me the true horror of war and man’s – well, some men’s – capacity to transcend that experience and find renewed meaning in life.
You can’t really love movies until you see “Fires on the Plain” and “Burmese Harp.” Rest in peace, Sensei. Your work is done.

Brad Bird — double nominated director and writer of “Ratatouille” — isn’t looking to rabbit out of animation now that he’s making a name for himself as a director at Pixar.

Ideally, the man wants to jump between animation and live action, he said at the Oscar Nominees Luncheon.

“Believe me, some people do say, ‘When are you going to make a real movie?’ There’s definitely that sort of feeling in the air sometimes, but my ideal career would be a career where I can move back and forth between the mediums and even do different genres. I want to do a western, I want to do a musical, I want to do a scary movie, I want to do a political comedy. I want to do a little bit of everything. So I just feel it’s all part of the same salad bar.”

His next project, “1906,” is indeed live action. It focuses around events before and following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

Get people yaking about George Clooney and the swooning and superlatives tend to come out in full force. So it went at the Oscars Nominees luncheon when “Michael Clayton” director Tony Gilroy — inevitably asked about his Oscar nominated star — put it like this:

“its such a stupid clich thing, but really hes better at the job of being a movie star than I think anybody whos ever done it. Think of what being a movie star used to mean you use to have to go and act and do your job and you were protected. You add to that working these rope lines, maintaining your dignity having a political world view that doesnt at the same time get too preachy. The things he does and the way he does them and the effortlessness thats seems to go into it. He really is the Michael Jordan of movie stars”

Praise, indeed. Clooney, whose first response to anything is usually off-the-cuff, informed of Gilroy’s words came back saying Gilroy “plays a drunken writer better than anybody.”

The cool thing about the Oscar Nominees Lunch is that you actually get to hear from a bunch of people who you haven’t already heard giving sound bite acceptance speeches at 16,084 previous awards shows. Yeah, it’s the trite-est of trite cliches that nobody’s a winner or a loser when they toss back a few and sit down to medallion of grilled goat cheese and Indochina-spiced beef with avocado mousse at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. It’s also kinda true.

Hal Holbrook, bless his dignified soul, will probably be gunned down on Oscar night by “No Country’s” Javier Bardem, but at the luncheon, the-man-who-would-be-Twain said something that would probably have slipped into his acceptance speech.

Superbowl weekend box office results are, for the most part, heartening. The top four entries – Miley Montana, The Eye, 27 Dresses and Juno – are all female-skewed, with the tweeny-bop concert film actually achieving the biggest gross of any movie ever released on the big game weekend (higher than average ticket prices helped, of course, but still, $29 million from only 683 screens is a bogglingly impressive number).
Add the steep, second weekend declines of the boneheaded boy movies Meet the Spartans and Rambo to the ladies’ triumphs, and it’s an encouraging victory. Especially in light of 2007’s all but exclusively testosterone-fueled list of box office and critical winners.
Then again, this can also be viewed as a traditional, sports weekend counter-programming gambit that just worked exceptionally well this time around. Without Ms. Cyrus’ fad peaking as it is at the moment, the numbers would be far less impressive. And there’s something not-so-vaguely distasteful about girls and women flocking to a teen star’s vapid show documentary, another badly made Jessica Alba fright fick and an utterly unevolved marriage desperation comedy (Juno is at least well done, but its feminist critics definitely have good arguments). It would be great if a serious drama or smart comedy about women wrestling with powerful issues won a Super Bowl weekend sales derby some day.
Then again, audiences wisely avoided the frame’s most egregious new chick flick, Over Her Dead Body. And two fine, realistic foreign films about women, Lebanon’s Caramel and Romania’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, did good business in limited release. So I guess it’s OK if Hannah Banana dominates the world for a little while longer.